Understanding the emergence and the nature of human cognition

I will begin with the question ‘What makes us essentially human?’ I will go on to delineate a philosophically-grounded theory that places hemisphericity centre-stage in a consideration of tool-use and language. I will draw on recent discussions of prediction-error minimization, embodied/embedded/enactive/extended cognition and mirror-neurons. I will illustrate the approach with reference to very recent work in machine vision and I will end by demonstrating the utility of the approach in the form of the most comprehensive extant modelling of data from isolated visual word recognition (Obregón & Shillcock).